Several times a year, I see some kind of mass-message sent out on Facebook by someone who lost their mobile phone. They want all their friends to reply with their phone numbers, so they can populate their new phone’s address book. This should not be allowed to happen. Your service-provider should automatically backup the address book on your phone for you, so that if you ever lose your phone, your contacts can be put on your new phone before it’s even active.
Blaming the “lusers” who lose their phones really is wrong headed. Even though you can sync your phone’s address book with your computer, it’s too much work for people, especially if they aren’t technophiles. (Hell I don’t do it, and I’ve got my own website.) And I would argue that it’s not even worth the effort! Losing a phone is an infrequent event, and and it’s just too easy to rebuild a social contact list. Even the most technophobic can just ask a few friends for the digits of their common friends. Obviously things like Facebook, email, and google make this process even easier. (And if all else fails, you can start calling the most-common numbers on your phone bill…)
Besides, ever since the dawn of personal computing, it’s been clear that people will not pro-activly take the time to backup their data, even if it’s single most important thing they could do. Engineers need to design around human fallibility, instead of believing they can “educate” people who’ve got better things to do.
What makes this all so bad to me is that the technology to automatically and invisibly safeguard a person’s address book has been here for decades. Whenever a contact is added to an address book, the phone could automatically send an SMS back to the service provider, telling them the name and number of the new contact. The contents of the message would be encrypted for security and privacy. On receipt, the tellco would add this tiny chunk of information to the database they already have on the customer.
And I’m sure the engineers who actually build mobile phones for a living have better ideas for doing this.